For the quarter, the overall market is down 7% from 3Q07 to 4Q07, as it followed a typically high third quarter (many vendors have their fiscal year-end in the third quarter), the report shows.
"2007 ended up being a good year overall for the PBX market, despite rapidly declining sales of TDM systems, which were down over 20%," said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics Research. "We continue to witness the migration to IP PBXs, but new in 2007 was evidence that end-users are benefiting from IP in a direct and meaningful way. Until now, most of the benefits have gone to the network manager, such as IP trunking-- things the user couldn't care less about. But this is starting to change, slowly but surely. For example, shipments of softphones were up 55% to 385,000 last year. These are the users that get to directly experience what's new and different with IP communications, by taking their office phone with them."
Other highlights from the report:
- Worldwide IP deskphone and softphone shipments are up 29% in 2007 from 2006
- The top 5 PBX/KTS system vendors account for 3/4 of total market revenue: Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens, and Alcatel-Lucent (in that order)
- Cisco was the only one of these with a meaningful increase in market share, and jumped from 5th to 2nd in 2007
- Sales of TDM systems managed to stay above the $1 billion mark in 2007, likely for the last time
- Hybrid IP PBX systems account for 2/3 of all lines shipped in 2007; pure IP systems account for 18%